Showing papers on "Movie theater published in 1984"

American Film and Society since 1945

Abstract: Although films rarely act as mirror reflections of everyday reality, they are, nevertheless, powerful cultural expressions of the dreams and desires of the American public. In the third edition of their seminal work, Leonard Quart and Albert Auster provide a complete post-World War II survey of American cinema and its often complex and contradictory values. From the self-confident affirmations of the immediate postwar era, through the social and cinematic turbulence of the sixties and seventies, to the darker, more pessimistic works of the nineties, America cinema has reflected and refracted American concerns. While adhering to the chronological structure and critical premises of the previous editions, "American Film and Society Since 1945, Third Edition," adds key analyses of post-Cold War and Clinton-era cinema. While films of the nineties evoked no single political or cultural current, their diversity provides a panoramic view of this most complicated time. Movies that reaffirmed American patriotism ("Saving Private Ryan") and debunked its politics ("Bulworth"), explored life in the inner city ("Boyz N the Hood"), dealt with homosexuality ("Philadelphia"), women's issues ("Thelma & Louise"), suburbia ("American Beauty"), and sexuality ("Eyes Wide Shut") add up to a decade as multifaceted as any that Quart and Auster have considered. No other work provides such an exhaustive and rigorous account of this parallel history of the United States. The breadth and depth of this latest edition will hold appeal for scholars, students, and general readers alike.

The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930-1939

Abstract: Jeffrey Richards examines the role of cinema in pre-war Britain, and looks at a range of contemporary attitudes to film Particular reference is made to censorship and the 'star system' This book should be of interest to students and lecturers of film and cultural studies, social historians and film buffs

Film Noir: The Politics of the Maladjusted Text

Abstract: How are we to situate a movie in history? By now there must be few practitioners of American Studies who would not acknowledge that the products of Hollywood provide a rich seam waiting to be mined by social and cultural historians. As in most mining projects, the difficulty lies in developing the equipment needed to extract the ore. To treat film as a source of cultural history is by no means as simple as that old-fashioned literary approach by which an author's biography could be interwoven with a summary political or social history. The cinema has no author whose individuality can be used to gloss over the absence of method in such a procedure. Or rather, any movie has such a plethora of authors that the attempt to establish evidence of authorial intent is bound to fail, as auteurist criticism has repeatedly demonstrated. The “authors” of an entertainment commodity are not simply its director, writer, producer and studio head of production. They include front office personnel, New York executives and the advertising staff, distributors and theatre managers who “author” the product at the point of its sale to the public. In any case, the historian concerned with popular rather than elite culture is at least as interested in reception as in production, and his or her sphere of interest must extend beyond the limits of the text and its intended meaning to a concern with context and with how the movie was received and understood by its primary audience.

The archaeology of cinema architecture: The origins of the movie theater

Abstract: (1984). The archaeology of cinema architecture: The origins of the movie theater. Quarterly Review of Film Studies: Vol. 9, Archaeology of Cinema, pp. 11-32.

Creating a National Cinema: The South Korean Experience

Abstract: Like the history of modern Korea itself, the history of the Korean film industry is alternately tragic and inspirational. As a twentieth-century art form, filmmaking in Korea did not enjoy the relative isolation that allowed other indigenous arts-painting, sculpture, and literature-to arrive at a distinctively Korean mode of expression. The development of the national cinema is concurrent with two decisive events in modern Korean history: the thirty-five-year occupation by the Japanese and the civil war that tore the country apart soon afterwards. The unimaginable cultural disruptions of the former and the wholesale devastations of the latter made the creation of a purely Korean cinematic tradition a difficult, not to say dangerous, enterprise. Nevertheless, even under the rigid strictures of the Japanese military occupation, and despite the adversities of wartime, a protean film industry managed to assert itself. Though Korean-made films were screened as early as 1919, historians of the Korean motion picture industry generally consider the work of actor-director Na Woon Kyu as the true beginning of the Korean cinema. Na's pioneering work in silent cinema set the standard for the eighty or so films produced during the so-called golden age of Korean film from 1926 to 1934. Typical of the nationalistic themes dramatized on screen during this time was the director's famous historical drama, Arirang (1926). Based on a popular folk song thataccording to legend-was first sung by a condemned man on the eve of his execution, Arirang became in Na's hands a patriotic tale of local resistance to foreign invaders. The implicit attack on the Japanese imperialists was not lost on Na's Korean viewers. The Japanese authorities for their part were suprisingly slow to catch on to the political import of such movies.

Mormons as silent cinema villains: propaganda and entertainment

Abstract: (1984). Mormons as silent cinema villains: propaganda and entertainment. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 3-14.

Cinema historiography in practice and in theory

Abstract: David A. Cook. A History of Narrative Film, 1889–1979. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981. 725pp. $24.95 cloth. $17.95 paper.

Made in U.S.A.: The American Child in Truffaut's 400 Blows

Abstract: For it seems to us that these works were the expression of a new current in the French cinema ... a current animated by a common problematique (however differently that problematic was worked out by different individuals) which could be characterized most simply as a reaction to the discovery of a new form of society being born, a society not quite recognized by its own citizens. Annie Goldmann1 In this sense, our novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost juvenile. . . . This is partly what we mean when we talk about the incapacity of the American novelist to develop; in a compulsive way he returns to a limited world of experience, usually associated with his childhood, writing the same book over and over again until he lapses into silence or self-parody. Leslie Fiedler2 Anyone who pretends an interest in film history knows the story of the New Wave's first great success. In 1958 Francois Truffaut and Monsieur Favre-Lebret, the head of the board of directors of the Cannes Film Festival, exchanged registered letters threatening libel. Truffaut, banned by Favre-Lebret from covering the Festival for Arts, attended without a press pass. The next year he was back at Cannes-as the director of the official French entry, Les Quartre Cents Coups, which won the competition for best direction. In the ensuing euphoria for the New Wave in French cinema, producers who had once despised the writings of the Cahiers group fell over one another in their eagerness to back first films by ex-critics. Chabrol, who began the wave with Le Beau Serge (1958), soon released his second feature, Les Cousins (1959). That same year Rivette made Paris Nous Appartient, Rohmer shot Le Signe de Lion, Doniol Valcroze, the editor of Cahiers after the death of Bazin, filmed L 'Eau a La Bouche, and, most importantly of all, Godard finished Breathless, whose success in 1960 equaled that achieved by The 400 Blows the previous year. In the next two years some sixty-seven journalists, academics, writers, and students would direct their first feature films in France.3 Most of these neophytes soon sank back into the printer's ink out of which they had emerged, but the Cahiers group-Godard, Rohmer, Truffaut, Rivette and Chabrol-launched careers which have continued to the present day. Despite an assertion that the unifying principle behind this group was the fact that they "all came to the screen by detesting French cinema and admiring the Americans,"4 Truffaut's first feature was not a conscious imitation of any American genre. His decision not to shoot an American style film for his first full length movie seems to have been due to several factors. On the most personal level, Truffaut confessed that the subject of childhood interested him because his own youth had not been a happy one. After an adolescence which included several minor arrests, desertion from the army and a discharge for being "medically" unfit for service, Truffaut had been rescued from aimlessness by an offer to write for Cahiers from Andre Bazin. When his first film won world-wide acclaim, Truffaut credited his success to the fatherly attitude Bazin took toward him. The scars of his painful growing-up were never to leave him, however, and he once told an interviewer that he had made The 400 Blows becasue he "was more at home with children than with adults."5 On the level of professional strategy Truffaut seems to have postponed his implementation of the pro-Hollywood critical position he had evolved at Cahiers until he felt more at ease as a filmmaker. He did not try that difficult melange of French settings and American genre he was to attempt in Shoot the Piano Player (1960), The Soft Skin (1964), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and The Bride Wore Black (1968) until his second feature. His decision to wait may have been motivated by the experience he had gained several years earlier when he co-authored with Rivette and Chabrol Les Quatres Jeudis, a script which was, according to Denby, greatly influenced by the American cinema of the Nicholas Ray school. …

The Still Point: Women in the Westerns of John Ford

Abstract: The West forms a basic imaginative landscape for Americans. Regardless of its reality, the West is home for much of our legendary material, home for characters either larger than life or somehow outside the boundaries of "real" life. "Out there," where the established borders and communities of the growing United States meet the wilderness, is the place that Americans (of European descent) chose for many years to imagine their conflicts with the land, its animals, and its original people. "Out there" is the setting for those questions about race, the value of civilization, and the use of land that still remain unresolved all these years after the West has largely disappeared.1I In this essay, I am interested in how John Ford imagined the role of women in two movies--Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956)-that seem characteristic of his work. Ford is an important and popular film maker, perhaps the best American commercial director, and for many people his name is synonymous with the movie western.2 He both understood the western genre in its orthodox forms and, in his later works, reshaped the myth of the American West in a number of ways. Looking at the women characters in Stagecoach and The Searchers will certainly show us something of the roles, actions, and behaviors attributed to women in movie westerns. But we too often divorce movies from themselves as cinema, treating characters as if they existed merely in a formless sociology. John Ford is a director of unusual visual power, and his characters have cinematic as well as narrative power. In this essay, beyond the simple identifications of women's roles, I hope we will be able to see that women as visual elements in cinematic creations are given expressly cinematic attributes. Stagecoach is a film about the complex connection between the fringe society of the western towns and the open, beautiful, and often dangerous wilderness. The images of town life and townspeople show characters cramped in oppressive spaces. Ford was an early film maker to use ceilings in his images-just one of Stagecoach's influences on Citizen Kane-and the ceilings in the movie bear down upon the characters. Life for town dwellers is limited. Rooms are small for the number of people in them, and the few windows let in too little light-filtering into spaces in constricted beams. By contrast, the wilderness has open visual panoramas, full light, and room to move about. Travel through the open space, though, frightens the whites. When they leave town, their cramped stagecoach mimics the town itself: the travelers squeeze themselves into a small space, isolated from the outside. Indians, of course-as spirits of the wild and therefore enemies of whites-do not suffer these conditions. Unlike whites, they find security in the natural features of the land. They accept full light and open space. The major chase sequence late in the film shows Indians on galloping horses riding outside in pursuit of a small group of whites packed into the small box of the stagecoach. Between these two visually distinct groups stands the hero, The Ringo Kid (John Wayne). He enters the film in a remarkably dramatic visual sequence. From a shot of the interior of the stagecoach the film cuts abruptly to one that moves forward rapidly up to Wayne. He stands with rifle extended from his side (our left), his hat comfortably back on his head, and Monument Valley (where Ford shot many of his westerns) spread out behind him. The film identifies Wayne with the wilderness throughout-even

Kluge, Film History, and Eigensinn: A Taking of Stock from the Distance

Abstract: Enthusiasm, celebration, and continuing fascination on the one side; dissension, crisis, and impasse on the other: a striking nonsynchronicity (Ungleichzeitigkeit) has over the years governed takings of stock of New German Film by American friends and the national cinema's domestic observers. The films may be the same, but the courses in time are not. Recent developments offer further proof of how decidedly dissimilar perceptions of the New German Film remain on opposite sides of the Atlantic. During the autumn of 1983 in Manhattan, the receptivity of the foreign cinema reached an all-time high. Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz enjoyed a widely publicized com-

A Possible Cinema: The Films of Alain Tanner

Abstract: Examines the work of Alain Tanner, the most important filmmaker to emerge from the new Swiss cinema in the late 1960s.

Advertising in the Cinema

Abstract: Val Morgan and Co, Pearl and Dean, and Brunnen White head Advertising are mentoned as the three major cinema advertising contractors, whose operations are described and the question of the value of cinema as an advertising medium is examined. The comparative liberal government regulations governing cinema advertising compared to TV medium, does not make it an attractive medium, and cinema is one of the least favoured media for advertisers.

Travels in Greenland : the cinema of Graham Greene

Abstract: Traces Graham Greene's involvement with the cinema, and examines his screenpl and the adaptations of his novels for film and television.

Out of the Light: An Analysis of Narrative in Out of the Past

Abstract: When Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past1 was released in November 1947 it was seen by the trade press as an efficient example of an RLO medium-budget thriller. The Hollywood Reporter called it " action-packed and suspenseful " and " solidly entertaining, " suggesting " a profitable box office pay-off."2 Film Daily headlined the film's "strong box office possibilities. "3 Yet, even allowing for this moderate enthusiasm, Variety was surprised to find Out of the Past placed as high as seventh in the listing of the top ten money-making films in the United States for the month of December.4 This set it just below such films as Hope and Crosby's Road to Rio and the John Garfield boxing movie directed by Robert Rossen, Body and Soul. It is not the film's takings which have commended it to critics, however, but its place within the film noir canon. Judith M. Kass, writing in Magill's Survey of Cinema, says: "Today it is regarded as one of the great American films noirs. ' '5 Tom Flinn, in The Velvet Light Trap, claims it as "a veritable motherlode o? noir themes and stylisations"6 and Robert Ottoson states in The American Film Noir that " Out of the Past is quite simply the ne plus ultra of 40s film noir. "7 As Richard Maltby shows in his article in the present number of this

Coming to Terms with Hollywood: From Mass to Auteur Theory

Abstract: From the 1930s onwards (with surprisingly few periods of recession considering the potential risks of investment) the Hollywood studio system provided a mass audience with a stream of Westerns, musicals, gangster thrillers, comedies, social problem pictures, and a host of generic variations and cross-breedings. In many ways, this particular system of industrialised mass entertainment has passed its hegemonic heyday, with the rise of television and the record industry. Nevertheless, the aesthetic status of Hollywood and all its works has been such a central issue in the debate on mass culture, in the development of American Studies, and within the history of world cinema, that it constitutes an important case-study of arguments and attitudes.